Word Places

Word Places is a relaxing word puzzle & room-decoration game. Players connect letters arranged in a circle to discover words related to objects. Finding the words unlocks the object & builds the room.

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Inspiration

Most word games ask you to grind — you solve, you score, and nothing you built stays built. We wanted the opposite: a word game where every word you find leaves something behind.

Walk into a room and you don't see nouns, you see a lamp, a rug, a window. Language and space are already tied together. So what if solving words was the act of furnishing a room?

What it does

Word Places is a relaxing word puzzle and room-decoration game built for Reddit.

Letters sit in a circle. Swipe across them to form words related to the room object shown at the top of the screen. Find all the required words and the object unlocks. Unlock every object and the room is complete. Daily puzzles bring you back for fresh challenges and steady progress.

Features

  • Swipe-to-connect word gameplay
  • Words based on room objects
  • Beautiful rooms and decorations
  • Daily word puzzles
  • Saved progress across sessions
  • Built for desktop and mobile Reddit

How we built it

Built on Reddit's Devvit platform as a web view inside a post — playable straight from the feed.

The letter circle uses continuous path tracking with forgiving hit targets, tuned to feel right under both a thumb and a mouse. Each room object is backed by a curated word list, and puzzles are generated from a letter set that must yield every required word plus a tail of bonus finds. Rooms are layered art, with objects hidden until their word set is complete.

Devvit storage keeps only what's needed: completed puzzles, unlocked objects, room progress, daily progress, settings.

Challenges we ran into

  • One input, two devices. A phone swipe and a desktop click-drag aren't the same gesture. Tuning tolerances so the circle felt precise on mobile without being twitchy on desktop took many passes.
  • "Related to" is a judgement call. Is shade a lamp word? Word association is intuitive to humans and slippery to systems. We iterated until connections felt obvious in hindsight.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The unlock moment. Completing a word set and watching the object appear is small, lovely, and the whole game.
  • Words that build something. The puzzle output and the reward are the same act.
  • Privacy-light by design. Gameplay progress and nothing else — a constraint from day one, not a patch.

What we learned

  • Reward players with something they can see. A number going up is abstract. A lamp appearing isn't.
  • Calm is a mechanic. Removing pressure didn't remove engagement — it changed why players came back.
  • Ship the smallest complete loop. One room working end to end taught us more than three half-built.

What's next for Word Places

  • More rooms — kitchens, gardens, studios, libraries. Every space is a vocabulary.
  • Richer daily puzzles with long-arc progress that rewards showing up without punishing not showing up.
  • Shareable rooms — optional, player-initiated posting of a finished room.

Support: Reach the developer through the Word Places Reddit community or the game's Reddit post.

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